To breathe your baby out

By Suzanne Swan

The ability to squat with both heels flat on the ground indicates good pelvic movement for labour and birth. Everything in this modern world seems to encourage us to sit with our tail tucked under.  We spend  a lot of time in cars seats and chairs that are like buckets, rounding our backs and creating poor pelvic floor health.  Have you ever wondered about the impact on our births just from the furniture we sit on?

Like all mammals we share a tail, or the remnants of one.  If you spend a lot of hours sitting your pelvic floor doesn’t really have a chance to release to its normal length, so it gradually shortens over time. A tight muscle does not equal a strong muscle.  A strong muscle is able to both fully contract and release.

While relaxing is important, learning to untuck your tail bone will assist you to breath your baby out, letting gravity do the job rather than having to push your baby out.  To learn to release the tail bone, we need to start sitting on our sit bones more, walk more, squat more and do more yoga! Learning to squat is a regular practice in our Active Birth Yoga classes.